BGS vs. population change?
- Thread starter xywa
- Start date
Only the Thargoid BGS changes populations
Any Thargoid Invasion or Thargoid Recovery system will have a lower population than it normally would (how much lower depends on the stage of the Invasion/Recovery)
Any Thargoid Control system which was formerly inhabited will have its population zeroed until/unless recaptured.
Watch Njorog over the next few weeks.
Other than that populations only change if Frontier adds new stations to a system (there were various - generally small - increases with Odyssey's new stations, for example)
Any Thargoid Control system which was formerly inhabited will have its population zeroed until/unless recaptured.
Watch Njorog over the next few weeks.
Other than that populations only change if Frontier adds new stations to a system (there were various - generally small - increases with Odyssey's new stations, for example)
There's a neat tie- in FD could make using the Thargoid war abandoned/shutdown mechanics and populating/depopulating systems. Give them a minimum threshold so there's always at least one place to dock (representing a minimum threshold of nonwar maintenance of stations), but stations could shutter as pop rises/ falls... with the effects noticed in markets/ ability to affect bgs.
And maybe, you could have expansion contingent on all stations being populated?
And maybe, you could have expansion contingent on all stations being populated?
Populations are static.
When a station/outpost/settlement gets added it seems to have a population value assigned to it. This only happened in large scale when Horizons/Odyssey released (ground assets for the new landable planets), otherwise only when Frontier adds something through a CG so it's very hand-picked. The BGS does not simulate infrastructure being built or new colonies being settled.
The Thargoid War mechanics gradually abandon (or recover) stations/outposts/settlements, so they bring population change with it until everything is functional again (or 0 if the system falls into thargoid control).
Lastly, Powerplay (which is in essence is a fight to control system populations) does not automatically handle population growth. Odyssey has been out for over 2 years now, but the CC changes by its population growth is still missing.
When a station/outpost/settlement gets added it seems to have a population value assigned to it. This only happened in large scale when Horizons/Odyssey released (ground assets for the new landable planets), otherwise only when Frontier adds something through a CG so it's very hand-picked. The BGS does not simulate infrastructure being built or new colonies being settled.
The Thargoid War mechanics gradually abandon (or recover) stations/outposts/settlements, so they bring population change with it until everything is functional again (or 0 if the system falls into thargoid control).
Lastly, Powerplay (which is in essence is a fight to control system populations) does not automatically handle population growth. Odyssey has been out for over 2 years now, but the CC changes by its population growth is still missing.
Was there any population growth?
The newly accessible stations didn't just pop into existence along with their inhabitants, they were technically there all along - just like earth-like/terraformed worlds are home to billions of people, included in the current population counts but completely unobservable by players.
The growth was the odyssey settlements or thin atmosphere planetary ports being added. For population numbers, yes, they just popped into existence when Horizons/Odyssey released with those new places.
Every time there's a newborn, some one is sent to the meat grinder.
Definitely. Pre-Odyssey, all the inhabited systems on this list https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/systems#CEI were added to a standard template and had a population of exactly 50,000 from their surface port. There's quite a variation now of ~2000 people per Odyssey settlement.
There is no BGS mechanism to adjust planetary populations. Any change to the population has to be manually added.
Way back in the early days of ED, Terraforming planets would occasionally be "completed", which transformed planets from "Terraforming" to "Agricultural" economies and increased their population accordingly. Likewise, when the Sothis Spur colonies were founded they all had tiny populations, which have since grown. Sothis itself started out with 30,000 people, now it's at 440,000 odd. But, apart from the auto-adding from new Odyssey settlements, all this has had to have been added manually by FDev.
I suppose it's a good thing that population isn't a BGS-affected statistic. Would we really want to see "population bombing" added to the BGS bag of tricks?
In the more general sense, it is still unclear exactly what the link is between system population and starports. Some systems have populations that seem unrealistic. Pareco is an obvious example: it has no planets or moons, just six space stations (four Orbis class and two Outposts) orbiting an invisible comet - and it has a system population of 2.13 billion. Are all those 2.13 billion people crammed onto those six stations, or are most of them living on/in the comet? Is it even possible to cram more than the entire population of 21st century China or India into six space stations 10 km long at most?
This is aside from the question of "Pareco is rated as an Agricultural system, and always has an abundance of food for export over and above the food it needs to feed its 2.13 billion people. So where exactly are they growing all that food?".
Way back in the early days of ED, Terraforming planets would occasionally be "completed", which transformed planets from "Terraforming" to "Agricultural" economies and increased their population accordingly. Likewise, when the Sothis Spur colonies were founded they all had tiny populations, which have since grown. Sothis itself started out with 30,000 people, now it's at 440,000 odd. But, apart from the auto-adding from new Odyssey settlements, all this has had to have been added manually by FDev.
I suppose it's a good thing that population isn't a BGS-affected statistic. Would we really want to see "population bombing" added to the BGS bag of tricks?
In the more general sense, it is still unclear exactly what the link is between system population and starports. Some systems have populations that seem unrealistic. Pareco is an obvious example: it has no planets or moons, just six space stations (four Orbis class and two Outposts) orbiting an invisible comet - and it has a system population of 2.13 billion. Are all those 2.13 billion people crammed onto those six stations, or are most of them living on/in the comet? Is it even possible to cram more than the entire population of 21st century China or India into six space stations 10 km long at most?
This is aside from the question of "Pareco is rated as an Agricultural system, and always has an abundance of food for export over and above the food it needs to feed its 2.13 billion people. So where exactly are they growing all that food?".
Isn't the amount of biowaste exported related to the population?
Yes and no.
The amount of any commodity imported or exported "at rest" before people start buying or selling it depends on three factors:
1) The economic size of the station. At a "normal" station this is approximately equal to the square root of the population, but can be hand-edited independently by Frontier. The Colonia region's economic size is - taking bubble stations as a neutral baseline - about 4 times larger than its population.
2) The current Political states of the station controller. https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/effects has what I've been able to find out there - they affect both pricing and "at rest" quantities, in roughly the ways you'd expect from a narrative consideration of what the state is.
3) A station-specific random factor so that not every Refinery is a clone of every other Refinery. Known ranges are at https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/specialisation - the units are arbitrary so that the economic size can be taken as sqrt(population) without having to apply an additional scale factor
I use Hydrogen Fuel rather than Biowaste for establishing economy sizes for a few reasons:
1) There's even less reason to trade it, so you're more likely to see a true "at rest" figure in the market without needing lengthy observations (though Biowaste is generally fine for this too)
2) Everywhere exports it so you don't need a separate rule for Agricultural or Agricultural-hybrid economies (you do - below - need a separate rule for Colony)
3) Its specialisation range is tiny (I treat it as constant, for simplicity, but that's probably not quite true nowadays) so long as you remember that Colony economies have a different number - whereas Biowaste has a very substantial variation.
There's a bit more complexity around hybrid economies though that doesn't tend to matter for H-Fuel or Biowaste. HE Suits are a good example of this - there are a lot of High-Tech/Extraction or High-Tech/Refinery stations in the bubble, which are 80% HT and 20% the other. HT produces, Extraction or Refinery consumes, but if you look at the specialisation page, the average consumption is about 8 times the average production for the same economy size - so with the station hybridisation only being 4:1 the other way, it's incredibly rare for those stations to actually have HE Suits available to sell.
I would argue that most info sites about the BGS are overcooked. It's not a bad thing, people who play this game really like to go in-depth to understand the systems and how they work, but unless you're in close competition with a peer adversary for a system, and it's a hot, long-term engagement, you don't need to know much more than "Do good thing for faction, make faction gooder".
As far as I can tell, population if individual stations only matters for which asset might go on the table... 99% of the time is "I want war to take assets off a person"... while the specific asset might matter to some extent (like, you might want the rearm/repair outpost 1000ls away, not the 200kls away orbis), you just deal with the hand you're given in most situations... things the casual player just wouldn't concern themselves with tbh.
I'm definitely a theoretical BGS researcher. I was as surprised as anyone when the details of the economic sim turned out to have a practical use once.